Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jan 28, 2013

What I prefer is to see women and children cut their attackers down.
This is not to imply that they should not do the thousand other things
needed to liberate themselves from the system of men, to challenge the
assumptions about femininity and masculinity which shuffle people into
oppressive norms, to create spaces which exclude the gender most likely
to act as tormentor, abuser, patriarch, raper and rent taker.

In
any system where sex* is rent, where childhood is debt and where gender
is a distinction intimately tied to notions of property, propriety and
right conduct, revolutionary violence is appropriate. It may not be the
only response; it needn't be exclusive. But, it is justified.

If
we can accept as generally true that labor must seize the means of
production, and that morality is a limitation imposed from above in
order to prevent just such a revolt, we must of necessity also concede
that those who suffer the consequences of the domination class' control
of property, family, wealth and gender itself have something akin to an
inalienable freedom to harm those who would subject them to this system
of alienation, and that any attempt to moralize or condemn this harm is
expressly and intimately a decision to maintain oppression.

What
I prefer is for women and children, for all those who have been
feminized from without as a prelude to their submission, to organize as Furies, as winged erinyes, and
for a period of no less than a decade, to have free reign upon the
agents of their misery, until men understand in their marrow that what
came before comes no longer, ever again.

Jan 19, 2013

Would anyone care about Aaron Swartz's flight into corporeal oblivion
if he was not the son of a white businessman, if he was not a "prodigy"
and a golden child attending a prestigious elite university which
itself exists to funnel high achievers into government, academia and the
corporate world, where they will trade on an artificially scarce skill
set while capturing wealth for those who lord over the rest of us?

Isn't
the essential back story here that he was a young man who's been cast
in the role of hero posthumously for doing nothing more than violating
the minor expectation that, being upper class, he'd act like a dickish
member of the ruling class all of the time?

And yet, that
is why he is valorized and lionized by academics, so-called radicals
and the rest of the middle and upper class white world which hadn't
heard of him until he'd done spectacularly what rich kids do ordinarily.
He checked out, and left other people to clean up his mess and make
excuses for his actions.

His revolutionary act? Making academic papers available to the kind of people who can afford them in the first place.

"Information will be free" is the mantra of people who don't have to worry about the cops, doctors' costs and hunger every single day.
It's the kind of slogan you can expect from people who take a computer,
an automobile and a college degree for granted. Its validity as a
principle exists in direct proportion to the height one occupies in a
social hierarchy.

For most of us, everything costs. All
of it. All of the fucking time. Free stuff isn't revolutionary. It's
unreliable good luck. It's what happens when the rich get lazy and bored
and want to prove to each other that all that money makes them special.
You don't count on it, because you can never count on the wealthy to
keep their end of any bargain. They're rich because they learned how to
live with using others as tools, how to betray and call it an economy -
or they learned to live with inheriting that stolen labor as privilege
and property.

So what if his name wasn't Aaron Swartz, but was
instead something vaguely black sounding, like Vontaze Washington? What
if he hadn't "liberated" a bunch of data that only matters to academics,
white people with free time and Lawrence Lessig, but had instead come
out of an underfunded public school, in a neighborhood where the cops
and the bureaucrats start off assuming that your melanin per square inch
exists in a causal relationship to your capacity for intelligence and
moral value? What if, facing no chance of gainful and steady employment,
he began to supplement his meager income by going into time debt to the
crushing tyranny that is an illicit drug distribution pyramid? What if
all he could afford to liberate was a few hours each week to help his
mother with the laundry and the groceries, and that the almost
inevitable outcome of his "choices" was that one day some suburban
douchebag was going to give his name to the cops after getting busted at
a college party? And while the future business major gets a warning and
a "boys will be boys," young Mr. Washington gets the full penalty of
the law?

Or, what if young Mr. Swartz was not Mr. Washington but
was instead a young miss Hernandez? What if what she was trying to
quietly liberate was her autonomy - not the assumption of it, nor the
probability of it as an intellectual exercise, but an autonomy so normal
and unquestioned that no man would ever assume that her freedom came at
the cost of his needs and labor? What if her act of liberation wasn't
hand waved away at every turn? What if her expected existence was not an
endless grind of male possessiveness and weakness masquerading as
attraction, a social norm which establishes from the day she is born
until the day she's predictably reduced to a statistic that she owes an
explanation and a justification for her every decision, else she's a
whore, a bitch, asking for it, stupid, should have been more careful,
had to have given mixed signals, provoked her attacker, tempted her
harasser, learned her lesson?

What if?

We wouldn't know their names. That's what.

So, what?

Some
rich high achiever offing himself after he's treated like a working
class woman, a migrant worker or a black man could only seem astounding
to white people, to libertarians and climbers and merit liberals,
because the cops, management and the law fucking with their worlds daily
is precisely out of the norm. Their everyday is a base line deference,
an assumption that they will do good in the world and that the social
order exists for their benefit. They depend upon it. It's the air they
breathe. It takes some kind of chutzpah heavy self-absorption - maybe
even an "epistemic closure" - to discover in Aaron Swartz's fate a
monumental tragedy.

So that's Mr. Swartz's high achievement, as
his history is forgotten and his myth commences. He got a bunch of white
liberals and libertarians to congratulate themselves over their shared
outrage at his bathetic end.

Jan 8, 2013

Jan 4, 2013

It's not that you've caused a person to doubt a narrative, that alienates him. It's that you've shown that he can no longer trust how he arrives at belief, or knowledge. Undermine faith in the certainty that an opinion was arrived at correctly, and you knock out one of the buttresses of the over-wrought and too-expensive cathedral of self.

Self is epiphenomenon. All of the chemistry of experience occurs before the emergence of thought and identity as a kind of cast shadow, or echo.

Societies function in this way, as well. You don't provoke stasis by attacking them head on. This strengthens the fiction of unity. You get their constituent parts to see that the single personality disorder that is culture is contrived not of falsehoods, but of untrustworthy conclusions.

She...Her...a muse, her own self, that sweetness on the morning dew side of the leaf...

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

Until today I had the same attitude towards Robert Greenwald as I do Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and most other representatives of the w...

"Now assholes and bureaucrats, take my advice...You’d better walk clear and you’d better talk nice...‘Cause we’re hot on your trail and we’re not on your side...Better forward your mail, shoot your wounded and ride...‘Cause when we’ve got all you desk jockeys safe behind bars...Claimed some of the neon, and some of the cars...Me and Billy and Oscar and the girls and guitars...Will be down in the gutter, looking up at the stars..." ~ James Luther Dickinson, The Ballad of Billy and Oscar